Pleasant Company

THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS (260 pp.)--Louis Kronenberger--Knopf ($3.75).

The U.S. has never had so many working literary critics as now, never so few who seem to enjoy what they read. One result is that they are themselves seldom read except by colleagues and students. Most readers are apt to conclude that the highbrow critics dig too much and dig up too little. At worst, they suggest that literature is so serious a business that it is a mistake to look to it for pleasure.

But pleasure is precisely what Man of Letters Louis Kronenberger (The Thread of Laughter, The Pleasure of Their Company) can find in books, along with enlightenment and instruction. The Republic of Letters is a collection of literary essays that presents writers as exciting companions rather than as cadavers for hypercritical dissections. A drama critic (for TIME), playwright and novelist himself, Author Kronenberger is not easily pleased, but he refuses to approach books as if the chore were unpleasant. In the essay "Pundits and Philistines," he speaks sharply of his colleagues: "More and more of our serious critics are moving into the tight, gnomelike little world of the pedagogues, carrying on endless ill-natured controversies in print, confusing purism with integrity, using every critical article as the basis for another. As a result, criticism very misguidedly denies literature any sense of allure . . ."

In The Republic of Letters such literary greats as Henry Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, Gibbon and Byron appear freshly alluring. Author Kronenberger can take the measure of bent, spiteful Alexander Pope and awaken fresh interest in "the master of the scalpel and the poisoned dart [who] reclothed cliches of thought so vividly that they long ago became cliches of language." He can persuade the reader that gabby Letter Writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is worth another whirl: "She had very few friends, but time was one of them." And he can be shrewd about such old critically-untouchables as Robinson Crusoe: "Having contrived all by himself a Little England, he turns Friday all by himself into a Little India."

Author Kronenberger has a nice way of seeing his subjects both as men and as writers, and, when the shoe fits (as in the case of Gibbon), as dullish people redeemed by works of genius. Quite clearly, Kronenberger's ideal is 18th century England, where style "was not just a matter of stance and stride, of paying a compliment or wearing a coat. It was something men commanded in the stress of business . . ." And in the stress of the business of criticism, Kronenberger commands an unmatched style. For he can balance a sentence as if it were a crown jewel on a velvet pillow; and he can also, occasionally, throw the pillow across the hall at a particularly dull archdeacon. The chief merit of The Republic of Letters (besides establishing the author as one of that republic's leading citizens) is a feeling it generates in the reader--the feeling that the books under discussion must be read at the first opportunity, or, if they have been read, must be revisited without delay.

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